I wasn't going to think or read about the election results because I would end up getting angry and then probably crying. Well, I couldn't stay away. It's like a fucking car accident.
There was this article over at Madison.com: Feingold's Future Unlikely to Include a 2012 Run. But the part of the article that made me want to scream? The part about the asshat who those asshat independents in Wisconsin elected:
As for Johnson, his campaign said he planned to prepare to take public office out of the public eye.
The media-shy plastics company owner Wednesday in Oshkosh gave what might have been his last press conference before becoming Wisconsin’s newest senator. Johnson, 55, reiterated plans to fight the new health care law and to block further stimulus funding.
Johnson spokeswoman Sara Sendek said late Tuesday that Johnson would spend the next several weeks "assembling a team" and would be "unavailable for media interviews."Yes, Wisconsin, this man is a complete moron. Thanks.
And then I watched Feingold's concession speech. I completely lost it. (I tried to embed it but it wasn't working.)
Fuck.
3 comments:
It's heartbreaking. And mortifying. Honestly. He was such a great senator and such a fair, principled guy--to see him lose to that rich dude (and mostly because Johnson's campaign outspent him by as much as 8-to-1 on advertising, largely due to all the "secret" corporate GOP money Karl Rove funneled into the state) is such an embarrassment. If he'd been voted out because he didn't do a good job, or because he was dishonest and misrepresented himself and his values over the years (like so many politicians do), that'd have been one thing, but he got booted out because a lot of impatient people fell for the Tea Party rhetoric. It's all such a farce. People got caught up in the "it's time for a change" talk without actually bothering to research who they were voting for and what they actually stand for.
My one source of pride: my county, Bayfield, went to Russ AND stayed almost completely blue this election, and so did most of the others up north. Kind of makes me want to disown the southern half of the state--shit, they don't care about us anyway. We're like friggin' Brigadoon to those people.
I was surprised when I saw the blue/red divide in the state. In the past, southwest Wisconsin was always pure red (when I lived in Grant County we always said there were four Democrats in the whole county and my mom and I were two of them), south central and southeast went blue (Madison and Milwaukee and the union-heavy Janesville) with a little red mixed in, central up to Green Bay went red and then the north was blue. But I seem to remember seeing a lot of red all across the southern part of the state.
But, I agree... It's why Feingold lost that made me so mad and why I was so disappointed. Midwesterners are a lot of thing, but I was always proud of the fact that Midwesterners have very little tolerance for bullshit. And they fell for a whole boatload of bullshit. They will regret it.
However, I greatly admire that Feingold stood by his principles to the very end. A friend commented that Feingold ran a shitty race. As I see it, he ran the kind of race that he would be proud of. Anything other than that would've changed who he was.
Another friend said this loss was one he felt -- like a dagger to the heart.
It really was.
As for being Up Nort'. In Madison, anything north of Portage was "up nort'." When I was in central Wisconsin, anything north of Wausau was "up north'" because that's where the interstate ended. Anything north of that was like the wild unknown.
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